Keeping watch
Software companies should welcome the harsh spotlight that’s been put on the technology industry this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.
REDMOND, WASH. — Software companies should welcome the harsh spotlight that's been put on the technology industry this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview at its 500-acre campus here.
"Having the scrutiny is actually good, I think," he said. The tech industry shouldn't think of it as "attacks on us," he added. "Anyone who is providing a very critical service needs to raise the standards of the safety of that technology and the security of that technology."
His statements underscore the unique and enviable position that Microsoft finds itself in, compared to its counterparts.
Microsoft has dodged the bruising that its peers have taken this year. Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter have testified before Congress, pressed to explain their privacy practices and the exploitation of their platforms by Russian operatives. Apple and Amazon are the targets of attacks from President Donald Trump.
But Microsoft, which runs the world's largest corporate email program and one of the biggest cloud computing businesses, has not only escaped the negative attention of its industry peers, but has turned potential attacks on its systems into an asset.
In August, Microsoft said it had disrupted attempts by a group affiliated with Russia's foreign intelligence service to create phony websites mimicking the U.S. Senate as well as a prominent conservative public policy organization. The announcement, which demonstrated the aggressive role Russian operatives are playing ahead of the U.S. midterms, was also surprising in that Microsoft had so far been relatively silent on the issue of foreign meddling.
Microsoft paired the Russia disclosure with the launch of a new security monitoring service that offers heightened threat protection that it will provide free of charge to government officials, candidates, campaigns, and other political entities that are Microsoft clients. The company says that more than two dozen officials and organizations have signed up for its AccountGuard product, giving the firm's security engineers even greater visibility into potential targets of foreign attacks and positioning Microsoft's technology as safer than its rivals. More than 400 million emails pass through the company's malware filters each day.
The announcement appeared to prompt competitors to create copycat offerings. Facebook, in the throes of its own security troubles, launched a pilot to protect the accounts of political candidates shortly after.
Nadella, who has described security as "the most pressing issue of our time," contrasted the hard lessons that younger firms like Facebook are learning this year with Microsoft's own challenges.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is a generation or two older than Google and Facebook. Nadella said the company's "big moment" in terms of a major security wake-up call took place around 2000, when Windows XP and other products suffered a series of embarrassing cyberattacks that affected many of its large government customers, long before the aftermath of the 2016 election, when the Russian threat became more salient and threw Google, Facebook, and Twitter into the spotlight.
The scare prompted then-CEO Bill Gates to issue a companywide edict, known internally as the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, that changed how Microsoft viewed security. From then on, Microsoft began to design such features into all its products from the ground up, Nadella said. For example, they delayed the launch of Windows Vista in order to follow new security protocols, such as threat modeling and reducing the number of people who have access to a system.